So, I’m reading this book by Johan Huizinga called Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. The basic premise of the book, or from what I’ve gathered it to be without actually reading the whole thing, is that human beings, and for that matter all beings, operate their entire lives under the conditions of play. That is, playing is an activity committed by certain beings for no other purpose than itself, exists almost entirely within spatially and temporally fixed spheres (e.g., Vatican City, funeral processions, baseball diamonds, etc.), and has a certain distinction or sovereignty from “the rest of reality” (video games are perfect examples).
Now, Huizinga basically says that all actions, words, and thoughts (and, resultantly, all institutions, social structures, and governmental systems) made by animals that operate within the mode of social hierarchy (e.g., wolves, primates, dolphins, humans, etc.) are simply meaningless acts of play. Where it becomes complicated is the seriousness to which the players of these games are in fact taking it. Whimsical playing, like that of romping puppies or imaginative children, are almost never taken seriously, whether by onlooking outsiders or actual participants of the game. Huizinga says that what makes these games so appealing to us is the enthralling quality of them; the degree to which they preoccupy our minds. As these games become more complicated and, thus, more enthralling, the more we forget how unreal the game actually is. The middle road of this spectrum could be said to be paradigms of contests, competence, and chance (e.g., athletic sports, chess, gambling, etc.). Soon, these games grow so large in whom they encompass, and so complicated in how they work (e.g., economies, governments, societies), that everybody begins to get lost in their play-characters (Huizinga cites instances where tribespeople, who adorn themselves with masks for ritualistic play, will often become so captivated by their roles in the ritual, that they “forget” reality).
Of course, this could be linked with the premises of Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (an interesting notion, come to think of it), but that’s for another post. What’s important here is a part in the book where Huizinga mentions what he calls the “spoil-sports” and “cheaters”. He asserts that games accrue players and teams and objectify certain tasks and in so doing formulate very durable social and communal bonds (e.g., church liturgies). Thus, the types of players that are often ostracized or punished by these play-communities are “spoil-sports”–those who fail to recognize the sovereignty of the rules of a certain play-area–versus the “cheaters”–those who feign compliance to the rules while breaking them, fully operating within the conditions of the game. In truth, the only difference between the two is that the latter breaks the rules in secrecy while the former breaks them in public. He goes on to suggest that the play-community will often tolerate the actions of the “cheater” over those of the “spoil-sport” so as to preserve the sanctity of the play-area and its rules. In this way, I interpret the “spoil-sport” as being quite the nihilist, an iconoclastic polemicist that tears down the values and rules of every contextual system he can put his hands on.
Could it be argued that reality is a forgotten realm of wonderment? That only the value-debasing ways of a nihilist, who takes nothing seriously, not even his own existence, can sober a world fraught with delusion and play-pretend gone wrong?